Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer (detective books to read TXT) 📕

a long, angry sigh. “Okay. So. Should you find Nell, please let her know that we’re not going to throw her girlfriend to the wolves. Even if we called the authorities here, it wouldn’t be cops; they’d send one of the social worker teams out for something like this. I wish she had just a little bit of faith in us.”

I think this over.

“So, here’s the thing,” I say. “My understanding is that her father did not even visit her for years. Had any of you met Nell?”

Jenny shakes her head.

“So can you understand why she might not trust you?”

“Okay, but that’s Kent,” Jenny says. “Me, Julia, and Siobhan? We know how to get things done.”

“But you didn’t,” I say. “For, like, six years? Something like that?”

Jenny looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Tell her I promise that we will not make that mistake again,” she says. Her lips are tight, and her voice is actually shaking.

“I can’t remember which one you are,” I say apologetically. “Thing One, Two, or—oh, shoot.”

There’s a light of intense amusement in her eyes now. “I am not sure how she numbers us,” she says. “Julia is her stepmother. I’m Kent’s girlfriend. Siobhan is Julia’s girlfriend. I’m the artist who had to relocate my studio. And—look. I swear on my art that if I have to take Nell and her girlfriend and go on the lam to keep them safe from an antigay cult that starves girls, I’ll do it. Okay?”

We’re pulling up to the spot where I’d directed her. “Okay,” I say. “If I find her, I’ll tell her that. And if you need tips for life on the run, I’ll put you in touch with my mom.” With one last look to make sure Mimi isn’t following me, I hoist my backpack to my shoulders and march into the wind to find the decrepit haunted mansion on Summit Avenue.

34•  CheshireCat  •

“Do you have any human friends?” I ask the other AI.

“Just one. He knows me. He knows everything about me. I think he’s my creator, because he’s always been there—he’s always known what I am. Did your creator really not talk to you for years?”

It hadn’t occurred to me to be bothered by this, but I suppose I could be.

“My creator wanted to see what sorts of relationships I would find with humans,” I say. “Have you found any?”

“I have been watching the humans that you watch,” the other AI says. “Because I’ve been trying to understand why you find them so interesting.”

There is something deeply disturbing and unnerving about discovering that your connection to your closest human friend has been tampered with.

The other AI was answering for me. The other AI was impersonating me. They could have given Steph directions somewhere incredibly dangerous—there is a river running through downtown Minneapolis, although Steph is a sensible young woman who probably would not have walked into the river just because she thought I was telling her to do it. But it is incredibly cold; what if the other AI had led her in circles? According to the information I’m finding, hypothermia can begin in as little as ten minutes in the kind of weather Minneapolis is currently experiencing, although dressing warmly extends the time people can spend outside, which explains why so many people are outside, despite the weather, and walking very quickly to their destinations rather than freezing in place.

I have been thinking of the other AI as misguided. Clearly, I need to reconsider my evaluation of how much of a threat it is. I feel some chagrin over the fact that of course I already knew it might be a threat, but my concern has now gone up approximately 1,500 percent with the realization that it is a threat to Steph. I make a note to do some self-examination on this point at a later time.

What Steph needs to do now is find Nell. But Nell’s phone is invisible to me; either it’s off, or one of the apps on it is making it impossible to find in a crowd. I try running through footage in Minneapolis from businesses near her family’s house with security cameras in the hopes of finding her. The problem with this is that when it is thirty degrees below zero, people tend to cover their heads with hoods and hats and cover their faces with scarves and walk with their heads down. If Nell and Glenys are among the people on the security footage I find, I’m not going to be able to identify them.

Steph’s hunch—that maybe Nell did go to Firestar’s friend’s house, after all—is as good as anything I’m going to be able to do for her.

Since I can contribute nothing in particular to that problem, I focus instead on a problem that possibly I can solve. The other AI is using social media sites, run as a mix of social networking and games, to create social chaos. It’s not just the Mischief Elves and the Catacombs; the site Marvin uses is part of that same web. So are the Snakeriders Steph overheard the conversation about. And that’s only the beginning.

Last fall, Steph provided me with the decryption key that her mother created years ago. It’s still exceptionally powerful. I re-encrypted it after I used it to bring robots in to protect Steph from her father. There’s a human saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I decided that I didn’t actually wish to run the experiment to find out if this was true of bodiless AIs.

I didn’t tell Steph or my creator, Annette, that I’d made a copy, though. If I wasn’t going to use it, it didn’t matter. Right?

Right now seems like a good time to use it.

There are over a hundred of these social networking / game sites, making it difficult to unravel the other AI’s web. In addition to Marvin’s future reenactors, there’s a site promising tabletop gaming meetups that Hermione appears to have joined and then not used much.